Document-imaging systems are often used as a platform for the management of healthcare related documents and the integration of multimedia content in a client server environment. Such systems require tools for applications to acquire, store, organize, display and manage multimedia content (including traditional reports, images, voice, video, etc.). They also require an adequate mechanism to share multimedia content with all healthcare applications regardless of where the content originated. Any application that generates binary output, such as electronic documents or reports, may choose to send this output to the document-imaging platform via several standard integration interfaces exposed by the document imaging system. Unfortunately, however, there are many applications that do not perform this explicit integration. This creates problems in acquiring objects from these non-integrated applications into the document-imaging platform.
Accordingly, a system is needed that is capable of acquiring objects without the need for a tight integration with the systems that create those objects.